Perspectives on the world

Jonathan Williams, Keeper of Prehistory and Europe

The Museum’s latest exhibition exploring spiritual journeys closes in the next couple of weeks. Treasures of Heaven is all about what it was like to be human in medieval Europe, and an inherent part of medieval European life was religion. Whether you were a woman or a man, young or old, rich or poor, Christianity was part of everyday life and the exhibition explores the role of worship and the objects associated with it – and how these objects were thought to provide a bridge between heaven and Earth.

The way that Christianity permeated all elements of medieval European life is one of the big things that make medieval Europeans different from us, and that’s why we need to know about it. For better or worse, medieval people lavished their money and time, their art and their passion on their religion above all else, and made some extraordinarily beautiful and moving things along the way, many of which feature in the show.

It’s been an amazing opportunity to gain a new insight not just into the craftsmanship and sophistication of the middle ages but, more importantly, into the minds and hearts of people in a particular moment in time.

You can say something similar about the Museum’s next big show, Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam, about the great annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, which will also give all of us a way into understanding a phenomenon that is central to the lives and imaginations of millions of people around the world, and millions of Britons too. The exhibition will explore the history of this famous pilgrimage through rarely-seen objects from across the world and will shed light on how the pilgrimage continues to be experienced today.

To explore human history is to explore human beliefs and experiences. This is what the British Museum is for – to enable us to see the world from different perspectives.

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I was just wondering if there were any Jewish ritual objects or a reference to Jewish medieval Europe in the collection? It would make an interesting contrast and comparison – especially the contrast.
Joan Stuchner
Vancouver, Canada

There are a number of objects reflecting the Jewish contribution to medieval civilization in one of the Museum’s galleries of medieval Europe (41). There’s a coin hoard and lead canister (in which the coins were contained) dating to the 1270s from Colchester, discovered by archaeologists in what was probably a Jewish financier’s house. There’s also a seal matrix of Rabbi Solomon of Coucy, a commentator on the Talmud, and an important Hebrew astrolabe dating to about 1350 which featured in the recent BBC Radio 4 series, A History of the World in 100 Objects.